Old School Essentials One-Shot Dungeon Crawls

I am rather new to his table, but... he was helpful, knowledgeable of the material, was willing to work with player ideas about how the game should run. Easy going and pretty laid back experience. Looking forward for some more adventures.

Old-school cool, battlemap oriented but made plenty of time for role-play. Knowledgeable regarding DnD but also very savvy with the Fantasy Grounds software. This combination lent itself to a night of immersive play with very few moments of technical fiddling. That is refreshing and rare.

Joining a one-shot, hosted by George, was my first exposure to StartPlaying. I decided to try it out as a spur of the moment type thing and was pleasantly surprised to see one-shots hosted the same day I signed up for the website. George was very accommodating and, despite my eleventh hour sign up for the one-shot, was extremely communicative in the hour leading up to the game. We had some new players, and players getting back into the game after long breaks. George was helpful not only with providing tutorials for the roleplaying game mechanics but in how to navigate the chosen virtual tabletop program. Expect a light hearted, casual approach to the game that is welcoming to folks and eager to get them into fun gameplay. Also, I have to note that, despite it being a one-shot, George utilized custom made maps he built in a third-party program for excellent visual aids that took advantage of not only the virtual tabletop programs Line-Of-Sight feature, but weather effects and object effects as well. He obviously has a passion for encouraging people to get into the hobby and have fun while doing it. This has apparently lead to cultivating a following of returning players who were a blast to play with. This was an excellent first experience of the platform and the journey of the illiterate, treasure-obsessed Mountain Dwarf named Balin may have to continue.

On the positive side: George made his own map for our campaign, which is a very time intensive thing to do, and takes a lot of effort. He knows the rules pretty well and sticks to the rules as written. What could be better: There was very little to no narration or story. At the beginning he mentioned looking for bandits, and we saw some footprints, and then never saw it heard anything to do with them again. There were basically no room descriptions or anything, we were meant to look at the map and try to figure it out, more like playing a video game. All this coupled with some technical difficulties and the fact that the characters were premade so our party didn't know how to play them at all, led to a pretty slow experience that failed to capture the imagination. -- George clearly put a lot of time into it, but if your going to play a game with him, I'd make sure your expecting something closer to a combat driven, video game style session. If your more into a critical role style game, this might not be for you.

Great fun leading the group and gave suggestions on best playing our characters.

George made it easy for a newbie to jump in and start hacking and slashing!